


Didn't Light It, But We're Trying To Fight It

by hufflepirate



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Billy Joel - Freeform, Gen, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Mission, Pre-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Song Lyrics, Songfic, Team Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-03
Updated: 2015-10-03
Packaged: 2018-04-24 13:02:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4920661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hufflepirate/pseuds/hufflepirate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Sam and the Avengers (well, some of them…) finish a mission against HYDRA, they break up the usual post-fight melancholy with a joke on Steve that gradually drifts out of control - in a good way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Didn't Light It, But We're Trying To Fight It

They were sitting in the back of the quinjet in a silence that was actually starting to feel companionable instead of strange.  Sam wasn’t really an Avenger, in that he’d never actually been recruited by SHIELD, profiled for the program, or added to the team.  But then again, he sort of  _was_  an Avenger, because the Avengers were cleaning up after HYDRA, and he was doing that too.  And it wasn’t like SHIELD was still around to tell him he  _couldn’t_  be an Avenger.  Right?

Usually, he tried not to think too hard about what he was now.   _Who_  he was hadn’t changed, so he supposed he was alright, regardless of the things that were different now that Steve Rogers had crashed into his life like a bull in a china shop and turned it all upside down.

Either way, the silence didn’t feel as weird as it had last time Steve pulled him into one of these things, and that was good.  Probably.

It helped that Tony was flying the jet this time.  He knew Stark had turned himself around, but there was too much history there for him to be totally comfortable with Tony.  He’d had too many encounters with Stark Industries weapons aimed at him or people he cared about, and he’d rescued too many good men injured by them.

Then again, he’d believed in Tony’s change of heart, even before he knew the man. Something about seeing him on TV, sitting on the floor with a cheeseburger, looked too much like some of the shattered men he knew for him not to believe Tony at his word.

But that change of heart wasn’t everything, and he’d had mixed feelings about pretty much all things Tony Stark since then, a pattern not helped by spending lots of time with Steve who switched perpetually between admiration and aggravation when Tony came up.

Then again, now that he’d actually met James Rhodes, the fact that Tony had made a suit for him counted for more than it used to.  It didn’t read as much like a consolation prize or a cheap gesture toward the military now that he half-knew Rhodey and fully knew how much of an asset the man was to the Army.

And sometimes there were days like today when he appreciated how good Tony was in a fight too much to think too hard about all that other stuff.  At least, he appreciated it too much to think about it until things got quiet again.

He shifted in his seat, aware that he was getting too lost in his own head, and that thinking about two men with matching suits no one else could have or use or copy was leading him in a dangerous direction.  Natasha smiled absently at him as he moved, one of her realer smiles.  It was tired, neither flirty nor overfilled with teeth.  It didn’t give the impression of fangs, like it did sometimes.

It wasn’t enough to draw him out of himself.  He tried not to get this way, but being in combat again - real combat, not fights he and Steve stumbled on because that just happened when you spent too much time with Steve - always seemed to awaken that overly-reflective part of him that wanted to think and overthink and wonder until he drove himself crazy.  He wished he could go for a run.

He needed to break the silence.  He pushed himself to do it, scrambling for something to say.

“Oh!” he said, suddenly, “Steve!  I’ve got another thing for your list.”

Steve turned toward him, his smile a little slow, like he’d been lost in his head, too. But then he was going for the pad, still kept constantly in one of the pouches on his belt, or in his pants pocket when he was out of uniform, even now that he had a thousand things to do, missions on top of missions.

Steve raised an eyebrow.

“The Muppets,” Sam answered, “But don’t start with the movies.  Well, maybe  _The Muppet Movie_.  The first one.  From ‘79.  But really what you want is  _The Muppet Show_.  Ran in the late 70s and early 80s.  They had a bunch of people on you’ll want to know about.  And anyway, it was a variety show, so it might actually feel sort of familiar.  I never saw vaudeville to compare them, but it’s that same idea.”

Steve nodded, “Ok.  What’s the movie about?”

Sam chuckled, “This is gonna sound silly, but it really is worth watching.  But anyway, a frog and a bear drive to Hollywood in a beat-up old Studebaker to follow their dreams, but an evil restauranteur is after them, because he wants the frog to be the spokesman for his french fried frog legs.”

Steve laughed, “Yeah, sounds like one I’ll just have to see to get.”  
  
“You know,” Nat said, voice pointedly casual, “Watching that movie on TV was the first time I ever saw a Studebaker.”  Her eyes twinkled mischievously as she added, “I always think of them that way, Studebakers.  On  _television_.”

Sam caught the reference, even with an extra word between “Studebaker” and “television,” but Clint was already running with it, kicking a leg out to nudge Steve in the knee with his foot from across the aisle, “Oh yeah, Steve, I can put some stuff on your list too.”

“Ok,” Steve said agreeably, “shoot.”

“Joe McCarthy,” Clint declared, “and Richard Nixon.”

Sam couldn’t help the smile that spread across his face.

“North Korea,” Clint continued, “South Korea.  Marilyn Monroe.  The Rosenbergs.  The H-Bomb.  Sugar Ray. Panmunjom.”

Sam raised an eyebrow.  Clint didn’t seem to be stopping, which was pretty impressive.

“Brando,” Clint continued, “ _The King and I_  and  _The Catcher in the Rye_.”

Steve opened his mouth, but Nat interrupted, cutting him off to keep Clint’s joke going, “Don’t forget Eisenhower, and vaccines.”

“England got a new Queen,” Clint threw in, and when Steve didn’t interrupt at that, Sam knew he’d figured out they were doing some kind of a bit, even if he didn’t know what it was.

“Marciano,” Nat contributed.  Steve wasn’t writing anymore.

Sam jumped in.  "Liberace.“

There was a moment of silence, long enough for his heart to beat into, and then they all broke at once, switching from deadpanned speech to laughing song because they couldn’t quite work out how to turn "Santayana goodbye!” into an item for the list.

“We didn’t start the fire!” they sang, Steve laughing now, even though Sam didn’t think he knew the song.

“It was always burning,” they continued, “Since the world’s been turning.  We didn’t start the fire.  No, we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.”

Sam thought they might be done, now that they’d hit the chorus and Steve had figured out what was going on, but Nat kept going, waving Clint silent for a moment as she sang, “Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev, Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc,”

Clint followed it up with, “Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron, Dien Bien Phu falls, 'Rock Around the Clock’”

Sam figured he was next, and was just glad he knew the whole next set of lyrics “Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn’s got a winning team, Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland,”

Clint and Nat joined in at a near shout, covering a few of Sam’s fumbles at the end with their own exuberance, “Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev, Princess Grace, Peyton Place, trouble in the Suez!”

Tony’s voice joined them from the cockpit halfway through the second chorus, and Sam realized they’d gotten louder than he’d meant this conversation to be.  But then, it had been pretty well taken away from him by now anyway.  He liked Billy Joel, but he hadn’t bothered to learn all the words to this one.

“Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac, Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, 'Bridge on the River Kwai,’” Clint barreled forward into the next verse, and it became quickly apparent that he  _did_  know all the words, and that Nat did too.

“Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball, Starkweather, homicide, children of thalidomide.”  They showed no sign of stopping, even as they went through lyrics Sam was nowhere near fast enough to sing along with.

Tony came back, the plane on autopilot, but at least he didn’t seem to know many more of the lyrics than Sam did.

The two of them joined Clint and Nat on easier lines, getting “Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, space monkey, Mafia, hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go,” but leaving Clint and Nat mostly on their own for “U2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy” before chiming in for “Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo.”

Steve had always been a quick study, and jumped into the next chorus somewhere between “We didn’t start the fire” and “It was always burning,” when he realized they’d made it back to the same words again.

As Clint and Nat kept going through “Hemingway, Eichmann, 'Stranger in a Strange Land,’ Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion,” Sam and Tony jumped in only for single words, though “Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania, Ole Miss, John Glenn,” went alright.

“Liston beats Patterson,” was shockingly clear coming out of Clint’s mouth and a disaster of half-wrong syllables coming out of Tony’s.

“Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex,” was easy again, but Sam was still proud of himself for being this close to keeping up, when he’d never actually tried to learn the song this thoroughly.

At “JFK, blown away,” Clint leapt to his feet, so that he could belt into a fake microphone for, “What else do I have to say?”

As they started the chorus again, Nat leapt up too, facing Clint so that by the next verse, they were spitting the lyrics toe-to-toe for “Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again, moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock, Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline, Ayatollah’s in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan.”

Sam knew more bits of the next set, but even the lines he and Tony could sing too weren’t enough to stop Clint and Nat from singing into each other’s faces as they over-performed in what was clearly a competition, now, somehow, “Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide, foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz,” or howling at the top of their lungs as “Hypodermics on the shore, China’s under martial law, rock and roller cola wars” built up into, “I can’t take it anymore!”

The last chorus turned into a dance party, as Steve joined in to the one part he could really handle, and Sam dragged him up onto his feet, too, to keep him from feeling too left out, even though he’d started out as the butt of this joke.

If the chorus repeated more times than it should have, it didn’t mean anything.  It didn’t mean they were trying to forget that HYDRA might really be the ones who’d done all the things in the song, or that they were trying not to wonder if they really _were_  trying to fight the fire, more literally than they’d expected.  It didn’t mean it had been a long day or a long mission or a long week or a long month, or that sometimes they felt like fighting the parts of HYDRA they could find was useless without knowing where the underground parts were.  It just meant this was fun and the mission was over.  Sam tried to stop himself from getting too far caught up into his own head.

When they finally calmed down again, they told Steve to put Billy Joel on his list, and they pretended that was all there was to say.


End file.
